It seems that on a regular basis, we hear about massive data breaches or companies sharing highly personal information with third parties without a consumer’s permission or knowledge. Tide Foundation wants to change that by giving consumers complete control over their personal data on the blockchain by allowing them to manage their own encryption keys.

The startup wants to take that notion a step further by giving users the ability to sell that personal information in an open marketplace that the company is announcing today.

“The overall concept is that when a consumer engages with a business and provides that business with personally identifiable information, the Tide Protocol encrypts that information and provides the consumer with the only key to decrypt it,” Tide co-founder Issac Elnekave told TechCrunch.

With full control over their data, companies could not transfer any information to a third party without the consumer granting permission first. The marketplace provides a way for companies that need data, the vendors that manage that data and the consumers who ultimately own the data to negotiate a fair market value for access to it. What’s more, the companies buying the data know that they are getting much more valuable and accurate information, delivered with the full knowledge of the consumer.

In the event of a massive data breach like Equifax or Marriott, if customers had been using Tide Protocol, the hackers couldn’t have actually used the PII in the breached databases because consumers would control the keys to decrypt it, rendering it useless to the data thieves.

Technically, the protocol works in a kind of standard business blockchain fashion. “Tide Protocol uses forked EOS nodes, smart contracts and additional proprietary decentralized layers to manage permissioned access to encrypted consumer data stored by businesses (vendors),” the company explained in a statement.

As for consumers controlling encryption keys, the company says it has created a patented technology to simplify the process of managing those keys in order to put that process within reach of anyone, one that passes what they call “the Grandpa Test.”

“We have developed a layer, a decentralized way to dumb down blockchain to a ubiquitous user experience on the web,” Yuval Hertzog, the other company co-founder, explained. He said the idea is to simplify the highly complex and make key management a typical kind of web experience.

Elnekave says the company has also found a way to comply with GDPR, the strict EU privacy regulations that went into effect last year that includes the right to be forgotten. Because the protocol gives consumers full control over the encryption keys, the user simply has to stop giving access to the business, essentially throwing away the encryption key and blocking access, he explained.

Tide launched three years ago in Sydney, Australia and developed Tide Protocol, the basis of its blockchain data privacy solution, two years ago. Today it has 13 employees. The company raised a $2 million seed round in November.

The startup believes data ownership should be a basic human right in a similar fashion to Hu-manity.co, the startup that wants to provide a similar set of tools as Tide, but focused on medical information.

Just before the Civil War, and long before the Federal Reserve, the United States had 8,000 kinds of money. It was a chaotic, confusing time to buy your groceries. Private banks issued notes with the promise of backing in gold and silver, but their actual value was anybody’s guess. Soon other companies—drug stores, coal mines, and of course railroads, the wealthy connectors of their day—jumped into the fray.

What’s old is new again in the hands of today’s barons of digital infrastructure.

On Thursday, The New York Timesreported new details about Facebook’s efforts to produce its own digital coin. Facebook’s first foray into blockchain will reportedly take the form of a so-called “stablecoin,” where the value of its digital currency is backed by the physical kind—in this case, a basket of global currencies. The idea is to tamp down the rampant speculation and tumult that have plagued other cryptocurrencies, like bitcoin, making the coin easier to someday use to buy your gas and meals (or, who knows, your neighbor’s cat tower on Facebook Marketplace).

The company’s blockchain team has reportedly grown to more than 50 people—cordoned off, the Times says, in a wing with restricted key-card access—and expects to release a product within six months. Facebook’s plans have been rumored since April, when the company tapped David Marcus, former head of Facebook Messenger, to helm a dedicated blockchain team.

The new coin would leverage the built-in connections of WhatsApp’s more than 1.5 billion users—and potentially billions more should the coin come to Instagram or Facebook itself. That alone would make it an instant competitor to Venmo (and its owner, PayPal), and to China’s WeChat Pay, which is attempting to make inroads globally, including in the US. Neither of those companies, however, uses a blockchain to send money, or even uses its own coin; WeChat users in China pay in yuan, just as American Venmo users pay in US dollars. Facebook’s clearest advantage, in using a coin backed by multiple currencies, would be to allow users to send payments across borders cheaply. In December, Bloomberg reported that the coin would initially be tested with WhatsApp users in India, where demand for cross-border payments is strong.

The question, however, is what a blockchain-based coin gives Facebook that tried-and-true payment methods can’t? Blockchains present an array of hurdles, especially relating to privacy. Bitcoin, for example, offers a relatively transparent record of transactions, which is no good if you prefer to shop away from the watchful eyes of friends, advertisers, or governments—not to mention Facebook itself. Technologies such as zk-Snarks give other cryptocurrencies, like the “privacy” coin zCash, more anonymity. But as former Facebook security chief Alex Stamos warned on Twitter, Facebook’s size combined with state-of-the-art privacy would turn the coin into “the go-to mechanism for global money laundering, tax evasion, and just general criming.”

Facebook is not likely to let that happen. With a centralized approach, Facebook could sidestep the sluggishness and high costs of decentralized blockchains, like Bitcoin, and keep an eye on nefarious uses of its coin. In any case, a stablecoin backed by real money is inherently centralized to an extent: The supply of the coins would have to be matched by Facebook’s ample coffers, and carefully managed.

But that approach raises another concern, says Joshua Gans, a professor of management at the University of Toronto. He questions whether Facebook could achieve its reported aims without starting to look like a private central bank. It’s tricky to maintain a peg to undulating real-world currencies, he points out, and to police the network to make sure people don’t game exchange rates or make a run on the currency.

“Basically if you were Facebook, you’d want to go to [former Federal Reserve Chair] Janet Yellen and say can you run this? And nothing less than that would be acceptable,” he says.

That’s a particular issue when the coin would leave Facebook’s walls and be exchanged for traditional money. Emin Gun Sirer, a professor of computer science at Cornell, says Facebook might want to rely on others for that task. The Times suggests existing cryptocurrency exchanges could handle logistics like verifying identities and storing some of the funds. But even exchanges that are well-established by the young industry’s standards have run into trouble (see: QuadrigaCX). That raises the question of why Facebook wouldn’t strike off on its own, either by building an exchange or acquiring one.

One hope for cryptocurrency purists is that Facebook could begin with a centralized approach and then gradually loosen its grip—especially as new technology makes decentralized blockchains more scalable. Earlier this month, Facebook acquired Chainspace, a company working on methods to scale blockchains. “We would expect them to test the waters, and not satisfy the purists,” says Sirer, who founded a company called Ava Labs, which also works on scaling solutions. “The question is will there be a catch. Will they embrace the potential of cryptocurrencies, or will they turn it into a walled garden?

“I honestly don’t think Facebook knows yet,” he adds.

To Gans, that walled garden might suit Facebook just fine, especially if one purpose of Facebook’s coin is to encourage more people to use more of Facebook. On WhatsApp, he points out, the coins will pass between established connections, increasing the chance that they remain with friends and family who never cash out. That could also be especially useful as the company increasingly positions itself as a marketplace for goods and services. Facebook has tried a version of that concept before, with Facebook Credits, a virtual money that was used to make in-app purchases on the platform, but couldn’t be cashed out. The company discontinued Credits in 2012.

“Like many other companies Facebook is exploring ways to leverage the power of blockchain technology,” a Facebook spokesperson said. “This new small team is exploring many different applications. We don’t have anything further to share.”

In any case, other social media payment schemes are coming, though none of them quite look like what Facebook is reportedly building. Messaging apps Telegram and Signal are also trying their hand at blockchain-based cryptocurrencies, but the Times reported that they likely won’t be stablecoins. Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey has thus far stuck with the classic: Bitcoin. Last week, he promoted an extension to Google’s Chrome web browser, billed as a “tipping service” for tweets, that lets users exchange micropayments over the Lightning Network\—an application built on top of the Bitcoin blockchain. (Dorsey is an investor in Lightning Labs, which is developing the network.)

Perhaps, if anything, Facebook’s stablecoin will lay the groundwork for other, more exploratory, uses of blockchain. Last week, in a discussion at Harvard Law School, CEO Mark Zuckerberg dangled one possibility: a decentralized version of Facebook Connect, where users—and not Facebook—would control their own credentials and choose when to share them. But as with most things in crypto, the idea, so far, has fallen short of how companies like Facebook actually operate. “I haven’t figured out a way to make this work,” he conceded.

Hey, look at that. A cryptocurrency exchange has decided to do the right thing – albeit belatedly, and only after a sustained public outcry.

The San Francisco-based exchange Coinbase announced on March 4 it had agreed to part ways with several new employees holding a particular grisly distinction: Namely, that they previously worked for the incredibly shady Italian spyware company Hacking Team.

Hacking Team, for those not in the know, has been accused of selling spyware to governments with dismal human rights records. For example, the Ethiopian government allegedly used Hacking Team tools to target journalists in the U.S.

So how did Coinbase get involved with Hacking Team? The company announced on Feb. 19 that it had acquired Neutrino, “a blockchain intelligence platform” that just so happens to have been founded by former Hacking Team employees. The reaction from the cryptocurrency community was swift, and negative.

A #DeleteCoinbase movement quickly sprung up, with cryptocurrency luminaries like Riccardo Spagni adding to the pile.

Wow. I’m really struggling to view Coinbase’s actions in anything but the harshest light.1. Deal with blockchain tracing firm2. Discover that firm selling client data3. Don’t disclose this to anyone4. Buy a firm that is made up of human rights violators5. Profit?!? https://t.co/9om7HRxape

“While we looked hard at the technology and security of the Neutrino product, we did not properly evaluate everything from the perspective of our mission and values as a crypto company,” he wrote in the aforementioned blog post. “We took some time to dig further into this over the past week, and together with the Neutrino team have come to an agreement: those who previously worked at Hacking Team (despite the fact that they have no current affiliation with Hacking Team), will transition out of Coinbase. This was not an easy decision, but their prior work does present a conflict with our mission.”

It is not clear at this time exactly what “transition out of Coinbase” means. Will the former Hacking Team employees get to stay on for an additional few months? Will they receive a severance package?

We reached out to Coinbase in an attempt to answer those questions, but have not received a response as of press time. How the company handles the departure of these employees will go a long way toward demonstrating what its “values” truly are.

Either way, it seems like Coinbase decided it didn’t need this headache on its hands.

Neutrino maps blockchain networks, focusing on crypto token transactions, and one of its main services is working with law enforcement to track stolen digital assets, investigate ransomware attacks and analyze activity on the “darknet.” Before launching Neutrino, CEO Giancarlo Russo, CTO Alberto Ornaghi and chief research officer Marco Valleri, worked at Hacking Team, a security and surveillance tech company that has been criticized for selling products to governments with a history of human rights violations, including Egypt, Kazakhstan, Russia, Saudi Arabia, Sudan and Turkey. As The Intercept reported in 2015, Hacking Team’s malware has also been found on the computers of activists and journalists.

The close link between Hacking Team and Neutrino concerned many members of the blockchain community. Amber Baldet, CEO of Clovyr and the former lead of JP Morgan’s blockchain program, told Motherboard that “given the number of accounts Coinbase has opened, how they choose to implement compliance tools and their relationship with law enforcement will impact a lot of people.”

In his post, Armstrong said there was “a gap in our diligence process” while Coinbase was shopping for a blockchain analytics startup to acquire.

“While we looked hard at the technology and security of the Neutrino product, we did not properly evaluate everything from the perspective of our mission and values as a crypto company,” he wrote. “We took some time to dig further int this over the pats week, and together with the Neutrino team have come to an agreement: those who previously worked at Hacking Team (despite the fact that they have no current affiliation with Hacking Team), will transition out of Coinbase. This was not an easy decision, but their prior work does present a conflict with our mission. We are thankful to the Neutrino team for engaging with us on this outcome.”

“Coinbase seeks to be the most secure, trusted, and legally compliant bridge to cryptocurrency,” he added. “We sometimes need to make practical tradeoffs to run a modern, regulated exchange, but we did not make the right tradeoff in this specific case. We will fix it and find another way to serve our customers while complying with the law.”

Coinbase achieved an $8 billion valuation last October after raising a $300 million Series E and is focused on broadening its user base from consumers to institutional investors. Neutrino’s eight employees had planned to move to Coinbase’s office in London has part of the acquisition.

If Bloomberg and the New York Times are to be believed, later this year Facebook will introduce a cryptocurrency which will allow WhatsApp users to send money instantly. Yes, that’s right: Facebook. Cryptocurrency. Earthquake! Revolution! The world is tilting on its axis! The end times are cometh!

Except – um – what exactly are people going to do with FaceCoin, once they receive it?

This is not Facebook’s first venture into virtual currencies, payments, or peer-to-peer payments via messenger app. Remember Facebook Credits, its previous virtual currency, launched in 2011 and sunset two years later? Remember Facebook Gifts, launched in 2012 and sunset two years later (there’s a theme here) in part because, to quote the redoubtable Josh Constine, “Facebook never found a way solve distance and localization problems to make Gifts work internationally”? And of course Facebook Messenger Payments launched in the US in 2015 and expanded to Europe two years later.

But FaceCoin is different; FaceCoin is on a blockchain. (As a longtimeblockchainenthusiast I feel I have earned some right to be a bit sarcastic here.) And FaceCoin is reportedly a stablecoin backed by a basket of fiat currencies, a la the SDRs of the IMF.

So it’s on a blockchain. What does a blockchain give you? Well, conceivably, smart contracts, but if it’s a backed stablecoin used for P2P transfer, it’s hard to see how those are relevant. Also, conceivably, privacy. Right now the crypto world offers stablecoins (Dai, Paxos, etc.) and privacy coins (ZCash, Monero, Grin) but — weirdly — nobody offers a private stablecoin. If Facebook were to do so, that would, in fact, be a genuinely big deal. Not least because:

On one end, a completely private and encrypted messaging service tied to an open, Zerocoin-like, zk-SNARK backed cryptocurrency and backed by a tech giant would instantly become the go-to mechanism for global money laundering, tax evasion, and just general criming.

On the other, without mathematically-backed privacy features having all of this data in one place would be a massive source of security and privacy risk, and a huge boon for countries with leverage over FB to get data access.

…although that assumes that it’s actually widely used, an outcome which is, to say the least, far from automatic. Again, just because Facebook launches a stablecoin cryptocurrency for peer-to-peer payments doesn’t mean people will actually use it. Remember Facebook Credits. Remember Facebook Gifts.

The trouble with stablecoins for payments, at least at the moment, is that businesses don’t accept them, so you have to convert them into fiat currency, like dollars or euros or cedis or what-have-you, in order to actually buy things like groceries or rides. True, Facebook could offer goods and services for purchase themselves in exchange for FaceCoin, but then it would basically be Facebook Credits all over again.

But remittances! you cry. Yes, very much so. Remittances are a massive market, and a holy grail of cryptocurrencies, and WhatsApp is widely used worldwide. Remittances are the obvious target market here. And it would be huge, and important, and wonderful, if Facebook were to make remittances 10x cheaper and faster … but that would require much more than fast international stablecoin transfers, because, again, those stablecoins are not legal tender at their destination, and I don’t know if you’ve noticed but businesses tend to have this whole thing about receiving legal tender.

So, yes, it’s great if you can send five thousand FaceCoin to your family in Ghana for an 0.1% fee. But then your family in Ghana has to somehow convert them to cedis at an exchange — a task which is, as of this writing, likely to be slower, much clumsier, far more user-hostile, and very possibly even more expensive than the usual medium(s) of remittances.

If Facebook can bulldoze that obstacle, though — then we’re talking about a big deal.

I see two possibilities. One is to establish partnerships with other companies such that they will accept FaceCoin themselves, so it becomes valuable outside of Facebook’s walled garden. But I can’t see this working. Again, it’s still not legal tender; it’s infeasible to partner with everybody; and it just adds more complexity for the user — “wait, do I want to pay for this with FaceCoin or cedis? Wait, do they even accept FaceCoin? Hmm, how does my government feel about FaceCoin and taxes, I wonder?” — , and the global WhatsApp audience rightly doesn’t want to deal with this. They just want money they can use.

But the other alternative is for Facebook to establish relationships with cryptocurrency exchanges worldwide, or — even more dramatically — become or sponsor exchanges themselves. Remember, much of the world already uses mobile money extensively. Imagine if FaceCoin could be seamlessly converted into eg M-Pesa or Orange Money immediately upon receipt. Then you could buy a thousand FaceCoin for US dollars in Houston; send it to your brother in Ghana, at the speed of the Internet (or maybe in a few minutes, depending on how FaceCoin’s blockchain works); and when he wants to spend it, he just pushes a button on his phone to convert it at the day’s rate into cedis in his MTN Mobile Money account, courtesy of Facebook’s Ghanaian exchange partner, in exchange for a tiny percentage of that rate.

That would be a huge, huge deal. First, it would offer seamless, immediate, user-friendly international remittances, which itself would be massive (the remittance market is roughly half a trillion dollars a year.) Second, it would allow anyone with a phone and the Facebook app to maintain a personal account in stablecoins backed by a basket of hard currencies. Ask any Venezuelan or Zimbabwean, or for that matter Argentinian, why that would matter.

That would also be insanely messy from a legal / regulatory standpoint. There are privacy issues. There are security issues. There are liquidity issues. There are KYC / AML issues. There are regulatory issues involving not just one, or a few, but conceivably hundreds of regulatory domains. But if anyone has the reach and money and wherewithal to push that armada of boulders up this hill, it’s Facebook — and the carrot of collecting, say, a few dozen basis points from the $500 billion/year remittances market is more than enough to incentivize them to do so.

I could well be wrong. There’s a very good chance that FaceCoin will just be Facebook Credits meets Facebook Gifts, except on the blockchain for no particular reason, in which case it too will presumably fade sheepishly away to be sunsetted two years after it launches. And even if I’m right, I too am deeply uneasy about Facebook, who have repeatedly shown themselves to be the opposite of trustworthy, becoming the global gateway for remittance payments worldwide. (Although, hey, it could arguably be even worse.) Maybe their blockchain will be sufficiently decentralized to be somewhat decouple from their influence, but that seems awfully unlikely (and would be pretty undesirable to regulators).

But if I’m right — then this is actually a really big deal, one which could be meaningfully important on a very personal and day-to-day level for many millions of people worldwide. Facebook would be, to my mind, at very best a deeply flawed messenger of this change … but they’re still (probably) better them than nobody, and, importantly, if they were to blaze this trail, it would then be much easier for others to follow.

Attention this week bent toward the House Oversight Committee, where President Trump’s former lawyer Michael Cohen testified Wednesday that the president was “a conman.” WIRED’s resident Mueller investigation expert Garrett Graff had five takeaways from the testimony. And while the politicians in the room grandstanded, Graff concluded that Cohen himself looked more credible than ever.

So riveting was the hearing—which included heated arguments about race, scandalous details about payoffs, and whispered collusion about meetings with Russia—that you’d be forgiven for missing that other things actually happened this week, too.

There was the whole summit with North Korea, which fell apart and revealed that President Trump can’t make a nuclear deal with a hostile enemy nation on his own. We also learned that US government hackers turned off the internet for the Russian troll factory known as the Internet Research Agency during last year’s midterm elections. The FTC hit TikTok with what the agency says is the largest ever fine for violating children’s online privacy.

As with almost every high-profile geopolitical event, this week’s summit between the US and North Korea inspired a flurry of hacking activity. Hackers sent out spearphishing emails, purporting to invite recipients to Seoul to analyze the summit with a group calling itself the “Korea-U.S. Friendship Society.” The email invitations included an attachment with malware code that researchers have previously associated with North Korean operatives. During President Trump’s first meeting with North Korea last year, there was a similar “spike in malware” from presumed North Korean hackers, one expert told CyberScoop. Last year, they reportedly breached companies across the globe while the summit was happening. So far this year’s efforts appear to have been tamer.

Financial institutions like Dow Jones keep track of high-risk individuals and companies across the world, to help clients make sure they don’t get their business tangled up with terrorists or people who have sanctions against them, for instance. This week, Dow Jones’ database, which was hosted on Amazon Web Services, leaked. According to TechCrunch, a security researcher found all 2.4 million entries on the database exposed. Among those listed were politicians, terrorists, and people linked to financial fraud. This isn’t the first time a watchlist like this has leaked; three years ago a similar list maintained by financial institution Thomson Reuters also leaked.

In keeping with the global trend toward an authoritarian-style internet, this week Thailand passed a cybersecurity law touted as protecting people from hacks. However, its vague wording and emphasis on allowing the government to access data and computer equipment without any kind of court order has critics around the world and in Thailand worried that it will usher in an era of massive surveillance. “This would give the regime sweeping powers to monitor online traffic in the name of an emergency or as a preventive measure, potentially compromising private and corporate data,” Jeff Paine, managing director of the Asia Internet Coalition, said in a statement. Thailand has been governed by a military junta since a 2014 coup, and has been accused of censorship repeatedly in its short rule. This new law, which passed through parliament with no objections, is right out of the Chinese playbook that encourages cybersecurity laws crafted to enable government surveillance, censorship, and control.

There’s this controversial Italian hacking group called, creatively, Hacking Team, which has over the years been caught selling hacking tools to authoritarian governments. As a result, Hacking Team is a bit of a persona non grata in the security community. This week, the stench from Hacking Team’s misdeeds wafted over and sullied cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase, after news came out that Coinbase had purchased a startup founded by three former Hacking Team members, according to Motherboard. Some Coinbase users were so upset they started a social media campaign to #DeleteCoinbase. But they found it wasn’t so simple. To leave Coinbase, they have to have an account balance of zero, but some members had “infinitesimal fractions of cryptocurrency called ‘dust’ in their accounts,” according to Motherboard, which made it hard to actually go through with their protest closures. Now they are reportedly getting around it by sending their dust to other users before closing.